The specter of jobless growth

The latest employment figures thrown up by the national sample survey organization raise troubling questions. From the survey it appears that over than last two years there has been a fall in employment by two percentage points. The employment figure has fallen from 43 percent to 41 of the population. Put differently, there is a decline in number of people employed either as casual labor or as organized sector workforce. This even as the private sector investment is at record levels. The grim employment numbers are in spite of the massively ambitious rural job guarantee scheme. The survey says that the proportion of employment in female causal labor was higher by one percentage point when compared to their male counterparts. Traditionally higher employment of females in casual labor has signaled agriculture distress.
Taken together the survey point out that the massive infrastructure growth has not yet provided the tertiary sector employment growth that is normally associated with building roads, ports and power plants. In it self this is not unique to India. It takes a time lag for tertiary sector to take off with infrastructure investment. The bad news is that stagnant agriculture growth has added to the job seekers pool and thus pushed up the unemployment figure.
The survey has also found a stagnation in terms of wages with the casual labor earning only 59.29 rupees - that is just about a dollar and half a day. This bellies the claim that Indian rural causal labor earns two dollars a day. The Indian pyramid, if these statistics are reliable, has an abyss at the end.
For those interested in economic policy and employment creation the survey holds three valuable lessons. In the first the infrastructure effort needs to be streamlined. The delay in implementations across sectors has created a concurrent employment slowdown. Secondly the governance of center sponsored job schemes needs greater scrutiny especially in the backward states. There is an urgent need to shake off complacency in this flagship effort to provide people minimum number of workday a year. Thirdly credit supply to micro businesses have to be streamlined further if self-employment has to be strengthened in India.
The survey paints a grim picture where more then half of all Indian workers are casual labor - that is if they get the opportunity to do so in the first place.